These are giddy times for the United Kingdom Independence Party.
Nigel Farage, UKIP's pawky leader, must wish every week could bring
blessings such as those bestowed upon his merry band of
euro-fanatics in the past seven days.

First, Rotherham's social work department rules that a
UKIP-supporting couple are latent racists of the sort that cannot
be trusted to act as foster parents for troubled, non-white
children. Second, right-wing Conservatives refloat the idea that
the Tories should form some kind of alliance or non-aggression pact
with UKIP at the next general election. The latter issue grants
UKIP a seriousness the party does not merit; the former a more
sympathetic hearing than the party has hitherto enjoyed. Both are a
boon to Mr Farage.

Rotherham first. The scorn with which the council's decision to
prevent UKIP supporters fostering children is entirely deserved.
Whatever doubts one may have about UKIP's policies in general there
is precisely no reason to suppose particular UKIP voters are
ill-equipped to look after children, no matter what colour their
skins.

A small party such as UKIP needs all the free publicity it can
get. Rotherham has been a blessing for Mr Farage. And so has the
Tory right's stupidity. The thinking - if it can be dignified as
such - behind Tory-UKIP plot is simple. At the 2010 general
election 21 Tory candidates were defeated in contests which they
might have won had every vote cast for UKIP instead been given to
the Conservative candidate. Minds more sophisticated than those
commonly found on the Tory backbenchers will appreciate that the
key word in the preceding sentence is "might".

In the first place, the Conservatives are not necessarily every
UKIP voter's second-choice party. Indeed, as a topical
demonstration of this, the poor Rotherham foster-parents in the
news this week are former Labour voters. Secondly, the idea that a
Tory-UKIP alliance would boost Tory fortunes ignores the
possibility that some people who have previously voted Conservative
and are presently minded to do so again might be put off the idea
of endorsing Tory candidates if the Tories are seen to be lurching
to the right and allying themselves with a minor political party
most voters consider a bunch of pink-gin-swilling cranks obsessed
by a single issue that, whatever its real importance, many voters
find crushingly tedious.

Securing a greater share of the euro-sceptic vote is worth
nothing if doing so loses you the votes of people who are not
exercised by whatever this week's Brussels abomination happens to
be. In any case, why stop here? There were 14 seats in which the
BNP vote was greater than the Tory margin of defeat. The electoral
argument in favour of a Tory-BNP link is just as compelling - that
is to say, just as daft - as a Tory-UKIP pact.

One of those seats is Hampstead & Kilburn, where Glenda
Jackson squeaked home with a majority of 42. UKIP (408 votes) and
the BNP (328 votes) made all the difference! Maybe so. But
Hampstead & Kilburn is a three way marginal, in which we might
reasonably expect the Liberal Democrats to struggle to do as well
in 2015 as they did in 2010. In other words, the battle in
Hampstead & Kilburn is for disaffected Liberal Democrats, not
disgruntled right-wingers.

If this is true of Tory-Labour marginals it is even more
obviously true of Tory-Lib Dem squabbles. Take Solihull for
instance (and you'd be welcome to the place): in 2010 UKIP won
1,200 votes, easily eclipsing the Lib Dem majority of 175. At the
next election, however, this is a seat the Tories can expect to
gain without any need to pander to UKIP.

The Tories' problems are found in metropolitan areas, not
UKIP-sympathising suburban golf clubs. In London, for instance,
they won only 28 of the 73 available seats and they fared little
better in Manchester and Birmingham either.

If David Cameron is to have any chance of increasing the Tory
vote to something close to 40 per cent he needs to win "mainstream"
votes, not those tempted to flock to fringe and minor parties. That
in turn means resisting calls from right-wing backbenchers whose
political musings bring one of HL Mencken's famous aphorisms to
mind:"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -
neat, plausible, and wrong."

Alex Massie writes for The Spectator and is a former
Washington correspondent for The Scotsman. Follow him on Twitter at
@alexmassie

Alex Massie

Alex Massie writes for the Spectator, the Times and the Scotsman and is a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy, the Big Issue and many other publications. He mostly writes about Scottish, British and American politics. And cricket.